Game Design: Revised Banishment Power

Banishment by itself works well enough, I suppose. While I was in the process of revising some of the other player powers to be a bit more punchy, I realized that Banishment just wasn’t as interesting as some of the others. Since I’ve revised the Depletion power to attack Resources, I thought that Banishment needed a little something more, to make it worth taking a risk.

Here’s the power as I introduced it:
“Activate 1 Reserve. If its value is greater than the value of target Reserve, its player exiles Destiny equal to the difference.”

Nice and straightforward. But here’s what I’m thinking … since I have several powers that are based around drawing and adding cards together, here I have a power that may be a little too straightforward in its application. It doesn’t really have any variables, it just works exactly the way it’s supposed to without variation. I like stuff that’s reliable, but here we have something that’s on the predictable side.

If you can expect a player with a more valuable card to always gun for his opponent’s less valuable cards, you have a situation with little strategic interest. In the board game Risk, it’s possible for two armies to defend against greater numbers than you might otherwise reasonably expect. The dice-rolling mechanic is there to account for strategic factors that would be unwieldy for a board game.

Anyway, here’s what I was thinking:
“Activate +1 reserve, draw +1 lot, and add the values together. If the total is greater than the value of target reserve, its player must exile Destiny equal to the difference.”

What happens now, is we start to develop something akin to what Sirlin describes as “Yomi”, you have choices for how to play your powers. You can go with Depletion, which is almost guaranteed to land and cost your opponent one card. Or you can go the Banishment route and try for a greater payoff. But your opponent can cancel either one with a single use of Forfeiture. So what do you do?

If you want to go the reliable route and take out your opponent’s Resources (or if they’re low on Resources, land a hit on their Destiny), you use Depletion. But they stand to lose more if you go with Banishment. If they have the Resources to quickly put another card in their Reserve, they can easily negate even a lucky draw for Banishment.

But then, if they don’t have much in the way of Resources or Reserve, they can wind up being locked out by your alternating Depletion (to keep their good Resources out) and Banishment (to keep them exhausting their reserves). Intercession then give them the opportunity to stop your Banishment without losing anything, at the risk of losing more cards via “staking” their lot.

Very exciting! I’m really looking forward to seeing if any of this stuff works!